My Musings

Category Archives: Prose

The air is heavy with the scent of crushed grass and last night’s rain. Driving through one of the few straight stretches on the ghats of Sahyadri, I glance at my watch. It is nine-thirty in the morning, almost an hour has passed since the last bustle of the maximum city. The throbbing roar of the engine feels like a just-hatched dragon between my thighs.

The twisting road embraces a scraggy rock face, forcing me to breathe-in the present. The road, though now in a state of disrepair, is still serviceable.

another bend…

the road snakes into

memories

I remember this road from the times I was dating my wife. The expressway was yet to be built and every weekend, a six hour journeyon this two lane highway, would mean meeting her. Sometimes just after the rains, we would drive down to a small hill called tiger’s leap and spend hours talking in the bleeding glow of the setting sun. The journey had never seemed long or tiring then.

white bedspread…

a thin mist takes over

our silences

I take the next exit, parking by the side of a small lake to stretch my back and legs.The lake is shallow, it may have filled up in the gentle rain of last two nights. A pair of lapwings walk its muddy banks. The yellow in their throat and beak stand out against the washed out landscape. I have never noticed the pattern or colour of a lapwing before. But then I have never stopped mid-highway weighed down with a sore back either.

One of the three roads that led to my house may have been the longest, but I was sixteen, had a bicycle and could ride really fast. Putting all my weight on the handle bars, I could pump the pedals and whizz past the lime-washed houses, the landscape passing by in grey-green blur.

But back then, I liked to slow pedal down this road. Through the shimmering heat, I would see the road-tar turn black beneath the scarlet Gulmohar blooms… would smell the besan ladoos, long before crossing the sweet shop… would whistle to the sleepy mongrel by the side of a shuttered comic book store and then stop awhile to cheer the local cricket team.

This road wound past a kids’ park, hopped over a culvert, snaked past a kite maker’s workshop, stuttered near a century old banyan tree… and then gently careened beneath her balcony.

Other than that her body belonged to the men. Those who came to her didn’t need courtship, so she would strip quickly and hang her clothes over the pegs on the peeling wall.

She would help their flabby bodies out of their scuffed belts and crumpled shirts, grope their limpness to erection and slip on a condom, while they bit her neck and pawed at her breasts. She could always recognize the men who were likely to tip her after they ejaculated inside her. From others she would ask for a bottle of overpriced beer.

Tonight, when her fourth customer pulls up his trouser over the cum-stained briefs, she too packs up her belongings.

On the fast local train back, she wipes off her lipstick and kohl. By the time she reaches the chawl, her son is already asleep, while her mother watches a daily soap on the small television they had bought last month.

She picks up her son’s schoolbag and settles down in a corner. Pulling out the new uncovered books, she wraps them in brown paper and thin cellophane. She holds the last one just a little longer before slipping it back inside the schoolbag.

Tomorrow, she will wake up early, bathe, and dress Ankur for his first day of school. She would click a photograph of his in the new school tie and hang it on the only wall in her house that does not leak.

It’s raining—just a drizzle that washes everything anew, leaves are greener, flowers more fragrant, birds chirping. It is the kind of weather that makes one want to smile at strangers. Yet, here I am cooped up for a meeting in a 20 by 20 conference hall. The fake chill of an air-conditioner, the ghastly glow of computers, drowsy faces and stifled yawns fill the room.